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\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFifty years ago, two men landed on the moon. That they were Americans inspired some justified national pride, but there was also a genuine belief, which I shared as an 11-year-old, that they had travelled that void on behalf of humankind.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOn 20 July 1969, the United States won its moon race against the Soviet Union, a rival super-power against which it was aiming similar rockets tipped with nuclear warheads, just as the Soviet Union targeted America. Global kumbaya had its limits. Still, it had been a civilised impulse that inspired President John F. Kennedy to make a peaceful space race the symbol of Cold War competition. The civilian space programme had military dimensions, and the astronauts were, for the most part, navy and air force pilots. Yet, the fundamentally peaceful purpose was underlined, ironically, by the common contemporary criticism that the space programme lacked any practical purpose at all.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u0026lsquo;We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things\u0026rsquo;, Kennedy had proclaimed in September 1962, \u0026lsquo;not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.\u0026rsquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIt would be going too far \u0026ndash; laughably too far \u0026ndash; to suggest that the win healed any American divisions. Fourteen months after delivering that speech, Kennedy was assassinated. In the years that followed, America became mired in a catastrophic war in Vietnam, poisoning the body politic at home.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c/span\u003eJust over a year before the moon landing, on 31 March 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson \u0026ndash; who had won his 1964 election with the biggest landslide in American history \u0026ndash; went on television to say that he would not seek re-election. The following month, civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, sparking race riots across the country. Two months after King\u0026rsquo;s murder, Robert Kennedy, the slain president\u0026rsquo;s brother was assassinated too. Robert Kennedy, a complicated and not always admirable figure, had somehow found his inner grace by that summer; he united a coalition of blacks and Hispanics with Catholic, working-class whites and liberal Jews that was never again truly intact. On the night of King\u0026rsquo;s assassination, RFK\u0026rsquo;s poetic, calming eulogy on an Indianapolis flatbed truck may have saved that city from the flames of black anger that devastated so many others.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAll of this was followed by the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention \u0026ndash; a riot of police and leftists, and a convention hall riven by rage over Vietnam \u0026ndash; close to a funeral pyre for the American liberalism that had emerged from the Second World War. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was dubbed at one point the \u0026lsquo;Happy Warrior\u0026rsquo;, emerged from the convention a wounded warrior. He still very nearly won the election. But he lost it to Richard Nixon.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAnd so it was Nixon who, one year after Chicago, presided over the fulfilment of President Kennedy\u0026rsquo;s moon promise, on schedule. The writer James Mann \u003ca href=\u0022https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/12/speech-richard-nixon-would-have-given-event-moon-disaster/?utm_term=.053a2e5d2369\u0022\u003ereported in the \u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWashington Post\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e last week about a haunting archival discovery. There were fears at NASA and throughout the American government that the landing might be successful, but that the lunar module might be unable to return to the orbiting Apollo 11 capsule.. If that had happened, astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong would have been left to die, \u0026lsquo;either by slow asphyxiation or perhaps by suicide\u0026rsquo;. For that eventuality, White House speech writer William Safire had drafted for the president a short address to the nation, which, Mann notes, \u0026lsquo;would have qualified as the most eloquent speech Nixon ever gave \u0026mdash; and one of the most poignant by any American president\u0026rsquo;:\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003c/span\u003eFate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men \u0026hellip; know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice \u0026hellip; In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man \u0026hellip; Others will follow, and surely find their way home. But these men were first, and they will remain foremost in our hearts. For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.\u003c/blockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eRichard Nixon, whose private speech revealed racism and anti-semitism, and whose private demons drove him to destroy his own presidency, was nonetheless of a time and place that required the marshalling of a common American ethos and national purpose. It was an ethos and a purpose that took us, on behalf of humankind, to the moon, that embodied confidence about our future, about new frontiers and a positive role for the progressive state, and which \u0026ndash; though it still tolerated some of the longstanding racial oppression that was in the process of unwinding \u0026ndash; could not have conceived of a public, presidential speech telling American congresswomen to go back to where they came from.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","className":"richtext reading--content font-secondary"}), document.getElementById("react_R8fRcpHnUijsJohR1zWA"))});
Five decades on from the moon landing, Dana Allin explores the ethos and national purpose that drove the space race, and the confidence about America\u0027s future, new frontiers and a positive role for the progressive state that it embodied.
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